Digging Domuztepe: week two – sore arms and bruised palms

Alexandra Fletcher and Rachel Swift are a curator and a conservator working at Domuztepe, a Late Neolithic site (about 6200-5500 BC) in south eastern Turkey. This series of posts traces the weekly progress of their recent excavation season.

Rachel Swift, British Museum

The trickle of small finds from site has increased as the digging has really got going and I have been cleaning lots of Neolithic beads, including a group found lying together as if they were once a necklace. I have also had the chance to do some digging on site giving me a better understanding of the context for the finds I work on.

Neolithic beads found at Domuztepe, undergoing conservation

I helped to excavate a large oven which I then had to draw a plan of – resurrecting archaeological skills I haven’t used in a while.

At the end of this week the whole dig team has a slightly longer break than normal – two days off instead of one. It’s great to get sleep without being bothered by mosquitoes and recharge our energy that tends to get low in the relentless heat. It gets hotter than 40˚ C on most days.

Alexandra Fletcher, British Museum

The site is working really well and the plan of a Late Neolithic house with several rooms is gradually emerging.

Alexandra Fletcher (left) and Rachel Swift, excavating on site at Domuztepe

The walls are made from mud and are surrounded by soil formed from the collapse of more mud walls. This makes them very hard to see and excavate properly. You end up scanning the soil carefully for slight signs of straight lines or different textures. Then you feel your way through the deposits using your trowel with a forward thrusting, twisting motion. This looks most odd to anyone used to working in the wet soils of Britain, where you tend to scrape the soil backwards.

Hopefully, the thump and twist motion means you spot the point where the soil breaks vertically and that’s your wall face. You really have to have the courage of your own conviction, because if you keep digging past the face – it’s gone forever.